I have a drive from a Macbook that I made into a USB drive to share files between Linux and Macs. To do this I of course disabled journaling on the drive before removing it from the Macbook, and all was well. Both Linux (a Debian desktop machine) and various Mac machines could both read and write to the drive. However, I got a new notebook, which I installed Ubuntu ﻿﻿﻿on, and found it could only mount this non-journaled hfsplus USB drive as read only, though “mount” shows it mounted rw, for read and write. I tried many things and read many blogs and forum posts and decided to try the tools that come with in the “hfsprogs” package, and specifically “fsck.hfsplus” as someone speculated that the drive might have been become corrupt during an unmount. The command I ran was:

sudo fsck.hfsplus /dev/sdb2

This check did indeed find some errors and report it had correct them and afterwards I could once again write to the drive.

I hope this helps the next person searching for this issue. I tried to get all the terms I was searching for, unsuccessfully, into title of this post to help folks locate it. Searching for this issue seems to turn up 99.9% responses about “You have to turn off journaling before mounting with Linux” which I knew already and was not part of the problem at all.